2019-02-22T15:48:49ZReforming manners, redeeming souls : Sunday schools, childhood, and the formation of early nineteenth-century American religious culture.https://hdl.handle.net/2104/10459
Reforming manners, redeeming souls : Sunday schools, childhood, and the formation of early nineteenth-century American religious culture.
Merging religious history with childhood studies, this dissertation analyzes Sunday schools from 1790-1860 to show how concepts of childhood, and young people themselves, helped shape American religious culture. Recent scholarship by historians such as Steven Mintz and Amanda Porterfield have pushed interpretations of reform past the traditional binary focus on social control versus social uplift, resurrecting questions of why and how evangelicals created the Benevolent Empire. This study addresses these questions by contending that ideals and anxieties about childhood helped create volunteerism, which in turn reshaped the structure of American Protestantism. Religious disestablishment, republican concerns about virtue, and romanticized reconstructions of childhood prompted reformers to found child-centric religious institutions on mass scale in the early national period. The resulting dissemination of Sunday schools established physical and imagined communities of faith exclusively for young people, impacting the wider evangelical community in several significant ways. First, Sunday schools promoted an alternative religious agency for children that empowered young people to actively participate in their own conversion processes. Adolescents also served as Sunday school teachers, enabling youth to assume unprecedented levels of religious leadership. Second, because Sunday schools were distinct from both the home and the church, they functioned as a space in which unmarried or childless individuals could work to convert children in ways that were traditionally reserved for parents and pastors, leading evangelicals to rethink accepted sources of spiritual authority.
Taken together, my project reveals that concern over raising moral Christian citizens for a new republic in which the place of the church remained uncertain led to a new focus on children within the era’s Protestant reform movements. This focus in turn redistributed spiritual authority to more marginalized groups, including young people themselves, and challenged inherited patterns of social and cultural authority. In this way, Sunday schools permanently altered the American religious landscape while simultaneously contributing to the formation of a broader child-centric culture that persists in the modern day. Thus, the priorities, power structures, and growth strategies undergirding nineteenth-century religion and culture cannot be understood apart from childhood.
2018-06-07T00:00:00Z“AD MAJORDEM DEI GLORIAM": Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Michael Novak & Catholic Identity in Crisis in Mid-Twentieth Century Americahttps://hdl.handle.net/2104/10440
“AD MAJORDEM DEI GLORIAM": Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Michael Novak & Catholic Identity in Crisis in Mid-Twentieth Century America
The 1960s were a time of great change in terms of Catholic identity and its relationship to American culture and politics. The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962-1965) deeply unsettled the American Catholic Church as its liturgical reforms posed a serious challenge to Catholicism’s status as a distinctive religious community in the United States. Two figures that embodied the struggle of American Catholics to connect their faith to politics in this period were Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., and Michael Novak. This thesis explores the roots of the ideological break between these two Catholic intellectuals and what it says about the nature of the decline of the American Catholic left in mid-twentieth century. It contends that the decline was a direct byproduct of anxieties related to the loss of tradition in the wake of Vatican II and the failure of the Catholic New Left to gauge the needs of working class Americans.
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2018-07-20T00:00:00ZMaking their own faith : Lutheranism and American culture in the Civil War era.https://hdl.handle.net/2104/10430
Making their own faith : Lutheranism and American culture in the Civil War era.
From 1830 to 1900, the American Lutheran church grew from less than 50,000 members to more than 1,600,000—five times the growth rate of the U.S. population—and became the nation’s fourth largest religious denomination. Along with this tremendous growth came dramatic changes in theological and cultural outlook. In the antebellum era, the majority of Lutherans believed that their church was on its way to becoming part of the American Protestant mainstream. By increasing intra-Lutheran unity, cooperating with Anglo-evangelicals, and modifying certain traditional doctrines considered to be too Catholic, they hoped to raise their denomination’s level of respectability and influence. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, the opposite had occurred. Divided into numerous competing church bodies, wary of and often hostile toward other Protestants, and ardently committed to their church’s historic confessions, the vast majority of Lutherans stood as conservative outsiders in American religious life. The fulcrum of this change was the Civil War. In 1860, Lutherans stood more institutionally united than ever before and the majority supported the project of making their church an integral part of mainstream evangelical Protestantism. Six years later, the church was fractured by sectional divisions and, even more significantly, theological disputes shaped in large part by debates over liberty, slavery, the Union, and religious nationalism. Following the schisms of the Civil War years, Lutheranism turned inward. Though divided institutionally, most Lutherans in the postbellum era embraced a form of the faith that comprised four components: theological confessionalism, ecclesiastical separatism, social and political conservatism, and American exceptionalism. Previous histories have stressed the role of immigration from Germany and Scandinavia in the formation of American Lutheranism’s conservatism and outsiderhood. While these new arrivals from Europe undoubtedly increased the size of the church, the intellectual transformation of U.S. Lutheranism was driven primarily by native-born Americans and immigrants who formed their ideas in the context of the nation’s religion and culture. Rather than an importation from Europe then, the confessional and separatist identity of Lutheranism in the United States was a distinctively American creation.
2018-07-11T00:00:00ZGoodwill, ministers, and manliness : the idea of benevolence in antebellum American benevolent societies and seminary education.https://hdl.handle.net/2104/10414
Goodwill, ministers, and manliness : the idea of benevolence in antebellum American benevolent societies and seminary education.
This thesis evaluates the idea of benevolence in two antebellum American benevolent societies, the American Education Society (AES) and the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), and then explores whether or not any notion of benevolence animated three antebellum seminaries. It argues that those two organizations held an idea of benevolence as ministerial manliness - strong and educated male ministers leading and modeling benevolence - as an imagined trait of orthodox Congregational and Presbyterian ministers contrary to historian Ann Douglas's contention of feminized liberal Congregationalist (Unitarian) ministers. Andover Seminary, the first case study, expounded benevolence as ministerial manliness but Union Seminary and Danville Seminary did not propagate any idea of benevolence, leaving ministerial manliness an imagined concept divorced from real ideas in Presbyterian seminaries. Overall, this work nuances the recent scholarly focus on antebellum benevolence and benevolent leadership as mainly female by analyzing male gender and male leadership in the AES and AHMS.
2018-07-11T00:00:00Z